Coal? Natural gas? Nuke? We can wipe them all off the drawing board by using current energy more efficiently. Are you listening, Washington?
By Joseph Romm

Jul. 28, 2008 | Suppose I paid you for every pound of pollution you generated and punished you for every pound you reduced. You would probably spend most of your time trying to figure out how to generate more pollution. And suppose that if you generated enough pollution, I had to pay you to build a new plant, no matter what the cost, and no matter how much cheaper it might be to not pollute in the first place.

Well, that's pretty much how we have run the U.S. electric grid for nearly a century. The more electricity a utility sells, the more money it makes. If it's able to boost electricity demand enough, the utility is allowed to build a new power plant with a guaranteed profit. The only way a typical utility can lose money is if demand drops. So the last thing most utilities want to do is seriously push strategies that save energy, strategies that do not pollute in the first place.

America is the Saudi Arabia of energy waste. A 2007 report from the international consulting firm McKinsey and Co. found that improving energy efficiency in buildings, appliances and factories could offset almost all of the projected demand for electricity in 2030 and largely negate the need for new coal-fired power plants. McKinsey estimates that one-third of the U.S. greenhouse gas reductions by 2030 could come from electricity efficiency and be achieved at negative marginal costs. In short, the cost of the efficient equipment would quickly pay for itself in energy savings.   Read More »

Northern Exposure
Sarah Palin's toxic paradise.

Sheila Kaplan and Marilyn Berlin Snell, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, October 22, 2008


There's no reason to doubt Sarah Palin's sincerity when she talks about her commitment to family and--more specifically--special-needs kids. When she introduced her son, who has Down syndrome, to the audience at the Republican convention, the family tableau drew cheers. And she issued a promise. "To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message for you," she told the crowd. "For years, you've sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters, and I pledge to you that, if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House."

Unfortunately, as governor of a state with a birth-defect rate that's twice the national average, and which has the gloomy status as repository of toxic chemicals from around the world, Palin has pursued environmental policies that seem perfectly crafted to swell the ranks of special-needs kids. It's true that Alaska's top leaders have placed industry wishes over environmental protection for years. But, instead of correcting this problem, she's compounded it. Peer into her environmental record, and Palin ends up looking a lot like George W. Bush.

Continued:
http://www.tnr.com/environmentenergy/story.html?id=96470ac7-2c43-4643-9703-ec3776ba5b10

Extremely long, a must read. MC

"This account appears in many different forms. It is consistent with--or can be made to be consistent with--a particular view of American political history that emerged out of the radicalism of the 1960s and is widely held today. On this view, elected officials, even the most worthy, are at best cautious and unreliable figures who must be forced by unruly events--and by outsiders--into making major reforms. "

".......The implication of this anti-political or meta-political narrative is that the outsiders are the truly admirable figures, whereas presidents are merely the outsiders' lesser, reluctant instruments."

"The intellectuals' rapture over Obama, their eagerness to align him with their beatified Lincoln, has grown out of a deep hunger for a liberal savior, the likes of which the nation has not seen since the death of Robert Kennedy in 1968. The eight years of George W. Bush's presidency only deepened the hunger; and last year it overtook a new generation of voters as well who, though born long after 1968, yearned for smart, articulate, principled liberal leadership."


The New Republic

Who Lincoln Was
by Sean Wilentz
And was not: the images and illusions of this momentous bicentennial year.

1.
The past three generations of historians have agreed that Abraham Lincoln was probably the best president in American history and that Franklin Pierce was one of the worst. Pierce, a New Hampshire Democrat, gave political cover to fractious slaveholders and their violent supporters in the 1850s. His softness on the slavery issue encouraged the southern truculence that later led to secession and the formation of the Confederacy. Apart from their closeness in age--the bicentennial of Pierce's birth passed virtually unnoticed four and a half years ago--about the only things that he and Lincoln had in common were their preoccupation with politics and their success in reaching the White House.

Continued:
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=2634954a-b287-480e-9fbd-8a4663174031

"“That’s why people are incensed about flag burning, or about what kind of sex people have in private, even though that doesn’t really affect the rest of us,” Professor Gilbert said. “Yet where we have a real threat to our well-being, like global warming, it doesn’t ring alarm bells.”"

July 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
When Our Brains Short-Circuit
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Our political system sometimes produces such skewed results that it’s difficult not to blame bloviating politicians. But maybe the deeper problem lies in our brains.

Evidence is accumulating that the human brain systematically misjudges certain kinds of risks. In effect, evolution has programmed us to be alert for snakes and enemies with clubs, but we aren’t well prepared to respond to dangers that require forethought.

Continued:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/opinion/02kristof.html

By Bill Scher
July 2, 2009 - 11:12am ET

When the CBO scored an early draft of the health care form bill from the Senate HELP committee as costing $1 trillion over 10 years but only covering one-third of the uninsured, obstructionists pounced and proclaimed the public plan option dead.

But the CBO had not assessed the cost of the public plan option, nor a mandate on most employers to either provide insurance or contribute to the public plan.

Now they have. And as serious reform advocates long claimed, including those two key provisions drops the 10-year cost of reform by nearly $400 billion, while achieving near universal coverage.

Continued:
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009072702/memo-deficit-hawks-public-plan-option-indisputably-saves-money

Franken said:
"I know there's been a lot of talk about the fact that when I'm sworn in I'll be the sixtieth member of the Democratic caucus. But that's not how I see it," the senator-elect said Tuesday. "I'm going to Washington to be the second senator from the State of Minnesota, and that's how I'm going to do this job."

I'm a huge fan of Al Franken, thinking he will provide some much needed leadership.

"Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense."
Mark Twain- Notebook, 1888

I wonder if this is because of the profit potential?

NY Times
July 2, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
The Patients Doctors Don’t Know
By ROSANNE M. LEIPZIG
AS they do every July, hospitals across America are welcoming new interns, fresh from medical school graduation. Given how much these trainees have yet to learn, common wisdom holds that it’s not a good time of year to get sick. This may be particularly true for older patients, because American medical schools require no training in geriatric medicine.

Often even experienced doctors are unaware that 80-year-olds are not the same as 50-year-olds. Pneumonia in a 50-year-old causes fever, cough and difficulty breathing; an 80-year-old with the same illness may have none of these symptoms, but just seem “not herself” — confused and unsteady, unable to get out of bed.

She may end up in a hospital, where a doctor prescribes a dose of antibiotic that would be right for a woman in her 50s, but is twice as much as an 80-year-old patient should get, and so she develops kidney failure, and grows weaker and more confused. In her confusion, she pulls the tube from her arm and the catheter from her bladder.

Continued:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/opinion/02leipzig.html?_r=1

New unemployment data came out showing the job market continues to worsen.

My Facebook friends reflect this. Four times this week, friends of mine have announced their availability in the job market via their Facebook statuses.

Colorado has lost almost 100,000 jobs in the past year according to the Colorado Dept. of Labor and Employment.

Only a fraction of the stimulus money has been spent, and most of that has come in the form of food stamps and extended unemployment benefits, and other direct assistance programs as opposed to public infrastructure projects. There is wisdom in taking the time to ensure that projects are sound and the money is not wasted, but it is frustrating to see that money delayed.

   Read More »

Think health care, renewable energy, climate change, etc. have a chance with such a corrupt branch of governm,ent? MC

After Call From Senator's Office, Small Hawaii Bank Got U.S. Aid

By Paul Kiel and Binyamin Appelbaum
ProPublica and Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Sen. Daniel K. Inouye's staff contacted federal regulators last fall to ask about the bailout application of an ailing Hawaii bank that he had helped to establish and where he has invested the bulk of his personal wealth.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/30/AR2009063004229.html?hpid=topnews

"The Environmental Protection Agency estimates 99.1 million televisions sit unused in closets and basements across the country. Consumer response to recycling has been enormous in states where the laws have taken effect. Collection points in Washington State, for example, have been swamped by people like Babs Smith, 55, who recently drove to RE-PC, a designated electronics collection and repurposing center on the southern edge of Seattle."

Article Here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/science/earth/30ewaste.html?_r=1

NY Times
June 29, 2009
By KIRK JOHNSON
DURANGO, Colo. — For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with one of the most entrenched codes of the West.

Precipitation, every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that water were assigned a century or more ago.
Continued:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/us/29rain.html?em

NY Times
June 28, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans
By FRANK RICH
LIKE all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, I was riveted by the violent confrontations between the police and protestors in Selma, 1965, and Chicago, 1968. But I never heard about the several days of riots that rocked Greenwich Village after the police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969 — 40 years ago today.

http://www.nytimes.com:80/2009/06/28/opinion/28rich.html?_r=1

I read a book on economics, can't remember the name, it talked of the fact that rubber was indigenous to South America, the only problem, they couldn't get the natives to work the plantations every day or even a good part of the day. Southeast Asia became the ideal location for the French to exploit Asian labor and the ideal growing conditions for rubber trees. They went so far as to distribute opium, at first for free, then to compensate for labor in the plantations. I won't buy a Michelin product to this day because of it. Part of the Vietnam war was fought for Michelin rubber as well as the rice growing capacity of the Mekong Delta, capable of feeding most of Asia. MC

Among the ruins of Henry Ford's America
In the 1920s the auto titan strove to export his empire to the Amazon rain forest. Have you read a parable lately?
Editor's note: This article also appeared on TomDispatch.com.
By Greg Grandin

June 26, 2009 | The empire ends with a pullout. Not, as many supposed, a few years ago, from Iraq. But from Detroit.

Of course, the real evacuation of the Motor City began decades ago, when Ford, General Motors and Chrysler started to move more of their operations to harder-to-unionize rural areas and suburbs, and, finally, overseas. Even as the economy boomed in the 1950s and 1960s, nearly 50 Detroit residents a day were packing up and leaving their city. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Detroit could count tens of thousands of empty lots and over 15,000 abandoned homes. Stunning Beaux Arts and modernist buildings were left deserted to return to nature, their floors and roofs covered by switch grass. They now serve as ornate birdhouses.

Still, in mythological terms, Detroit remains the ancestral birthplace of American capitalism. In years to come, the sudden disintegration of the Big Three will be seen as a blow to American power comparable to the end of the Raj, Britain's loss of India, that jewel in the imperial crown, in 1948. Forget the possession of a colony or the bomb, in the second half of the 20th century, the real marker of a world power was the ability to make a precision V-8.

More at Salon.Com
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/26/fordlandia/

NY Times
June 26, 2009, 6:00 am
Is Health Care Reform Worth $1.6 Trillion?
By Uwe E. Reinhardt
Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton.

Like Captain Renault in “Casablanca,” who found himself “shocked, shocked” to discover that there was gambling going on at Rick’s Café, moments before pocketing his cut of the evening’s gambling profits, Congress last week expressed “shock, shock” at what was already well-known in policy wonkdom — namely, that a move to genuine universal health insurance coverage might easily entail federal budget costs of $1.6 trillion over the next decade.

There followed a scramble on the Hill to trim the proposed reform package, to keep its price tag below $1 trillion or so for the decade.

A price tag of $1.6 trillion seems immense if one contemplates the figure in the abstract. It is, however, only about 4 percent of the total cumulative health spending of $40 trillion, the amount government actuaries now project for the decade from 2010 to 2020. That is also less than the 6 to 7 percent that total national health spending has increased each year in the past decade.

And $1.6 trillion is only about 1 percent of the amount of G.D.P. that America can reasonably be expected to produce in the next decade (about $150 trillion to $170 trillion).   Read More »

The figures work out to about $322,000 a year for each of the 535 men and women in congress. For a Congressman that is $644,000 an election cycle, for a Senator $1.93 Million. Not sure why they bother people like me to give to their re-election campaigns. MC

For Release:
Weds., March 4, 2009 For More Information:
Robert Weissman, 202-387-8030; 202-360-1844 (cell)
Harvey Rosenfield, 310-345-8816


$5 BILLION IN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS BOUGHT WALL STREET FREEDOM FROM REGULATION, RESTRAINT, REPORT FINDS

Steps to Financial Cataclysm Paved with Industry Dollars

March 4 - The financial sector invested more than $5 billion in political influence purchasing in Washington over the past decade, with as many as 3,000 lobbyists winning deregulation and other policy decisions that led directly to the current financial collapse, according to a 231-page report issued today by Essential Information and the Consumer Education Foundation.

The report, "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America," shows that, from 1998-2008, Wall Street investment firms, commercial banks, hedge funds, real estate companies and insurance conglomerates made $1.725 billion in political contributions and spent another $3.4 billion on lobbyists, a financial juggernaut aimed at undercutting federal regulation. Nearly 3,000 officially registered federal lobbyists worked for the industry in 2007 alone. The report documents a dozen distinct deregulatory moves that, together, led to the financial meltdown. These include prohibitions on regulating financial derivatives; the repeal of regulatory barriers between commercial banks and investment banks; a voluntary regulation scheme for big investment banks; and federal refusal to act to stop predatory subprime lending.   Read More »

One can only hope when former president Jimmy Carter dies, that saintly man will garner as much attention as Michael Jackson's passing. I suspect that he will NOT. It costs $69 a year to feed a starving child in Africa. In order to save five million children under the age of five from death by starvation, it would cost $345 million a year. That is .0006 percent of the US Defense budget. Michael Jackson made about $375 million over the last 15 years, assuming $25 million a year, I would think that he made more considering that at one time he owned all the music of the Beatles. Moral of the story? Two actually. No one gets out of here alive and we spend entirely too much money on blowing things and people up. MC

"Five million African children under age 5 died last year — 40 percent of deaths worldwide — and malnutrition was a major contributor to half of those deaths. Sub-Saharan children under 5 died not only at 22 times the rate of children in wealthy nations, but also at twice the rate for the entire developing world."

Source:
NY Times
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: December 28, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/world/africa/28malnutrition.html?hp&ex=1167368400&en=23714465133e44e2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Nearly $1.4 Million dollars PER DAY. That's what the health industry lobby is spending in Washington right now to defeat healthcare reform.1

Let's fight their money with our voices and get real healthcare reform.

Those of us who have insurance are seeing our premiums go up at twice the rate of wages,2 higher and higher deductibles, and shocking tactics by insurers to avoid paying claims. More and more employers are dropping insurance altogether because they just can't afford it any longer, adding to the ranks of more than 47 million Americans who have no insurance.3

That's why polls show the vast majority of Americans support healthcare reform that includes a "public option" - public health insurance that would compete fairly with private insurance companies and offer consumers greater choice, expand coverage to more Americans, and ultimately lower healthcare costs.4

So why are there so many news reports that a public option is in trouble? You think maybe that has something to do with the millions of dollars that Big Insurance is throwing around in Washington?5

Congress and the President are seriously focused on healthcare reform for the first time in over fifteen years. We can't afford to let Big Insurance defeat healthcare reform again. Please support the public option:

http://www.ProgressNowColorado.org/publicoption

We'll hand deliver this petition to every member of Colorado's Congressional delegation - both senators and all seven of our representatives - on July 13th at their offices in Washington.

Bills are already moving through committees in the House and Senate. Whether or not a public option remains on the table will be decided in the next couple of weeks. Please take action now:

http://www.ProgressNowColorado.org/publicoption

Thanks for speaking out.

1 Legislating Under the Influence, Common Cause, June 24, 2009.
2 The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Employee Health Benefits: 2008 Annual Survey. September 2008.
3 The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
4 Building on Success: The Role of Public Coverage Programs in Health Reform, Center for American Progress.
5 Legislating Under the Influence, Common Cause, June 24, 2009. In addition to lobbying expenditures, the health industry has spent about $373 Million on campaign contributions to members of Congress since 2000.

NY Times
June 24, 2009
Deep in Bedrock, Clean Energy and Quake Fears
By JAMES GLANZ
BASEL, Switzerland — Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was a hero in this city of medieval cathedrals and intense environmental passion three years ago, all because he had drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane.

He was prospecting for a vast source of clean, renewable energy that seemed straight out of a Jules Verne novel: the heat simmering within the earth’s bedrock.

All seemed to be going well — until Dec. 8, 2006, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.

Hastily shut down, Mr. Häring’s project was soon forgotten by nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area two hours’ drive north of San Francisco.

More Here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/energy-environment/24geotherm.html?hpw